Tag: new recipes

Ever have those weeks where you are just bored of everything you usually eat? That has definitely be me lately! I’ve been all about the new recipes and this week’s meal prep is no exception! I can’t wait to share all of these foods with you!

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to share recipes with you for some of them just yet….I am still testing them out, so it will be a bit!

Next up, a pan roasted veggies and chicken sausage dish and a couple styles of burrito bowls. These turned out well, but still need some tweaking before I’m ready to share the recipe! Here are a couple similar style dishes that I’ve made before and loved!

For our snacks and sides this week, I tried some new things as well! Along with my Healthier Cinnamon Bread and our protein balls (recipe will finally be posted later this week!!), I made some peanut butter and banana roll-ups and a turkey pinwheel. I should have the recipes for those for you next week!

That’s it for this week! You can try out the two main dishes that I had recipes for and download your grocery list for them here:

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I know this week’s meal prep was pretty short (and a day late….) but I hope you will bear with me! Hopefully I will have plenty of new recipes ready to share with you soon!

Are you ready for this week’s meal prep?! I have been looking forward to sharing it with you ALL WEEK! Not only was this prep super simple and inexpensive to throw together, but it also is delicious and flavorful! I’ve really been in the mood for new foods right now, so there are a couple new recipes in here too!

Enjoy!

To start things off, our one repeat recipe – Slow Cooker Italian Red Pepper Chicken. Y’all, I seriously love this recipe. Not only is it super flavorful, but there are so many ways to eat it! Over rice or noodles, with scrambled eggs, in a sandwich or wrap or even on it’s own! No matter how you eat it, it’s gonna be tasty. This week Draz and I both seemed to be into the wraps, so that is mostly how we had them. I love putting a bit of shredded mozzarella in with it!

So. Good.

Ok, on to one of our new recipes! Kale and Cauliflower Soup. This ended up being my lunch every day and it was so tasty! While I am a big fan of eating meat, this soup was hearty enough that I didn’t even notice it’s absence. Add to it being super quick to put together and it is definitely on the “make again” list!

The only real change I made was that I used chicken stock instead of vegetable, since that is what I had on hand.

A word of caution though….

So, in my flow of cooking, I forgot one essential rule while I was making this soup. When blending hot soups, you really should only fill halfway. Also, you should take the cap off of the lid and cover with a towel to allow steam to escape.

Did I do either of these things? Nope!

Not only that, I couldn’t figure out right away why this explosion of hot soup happened….so I poured some back into the pot and proceeded to try again. Only to have it explode again! Yup, I was that person. So, if you like to blend soups to thicken them up like I do, make sure you don’t forget that rule haha!

And on to less-explosive dishes….our other main dish this week was a cabbage and chicken sausage saute. I didn’t really follow a recipe on this one, since it was mostly planned to use up extra ingredients.

For this particular saute, I used

cajun chicken sausage

broccoli (1 medium head)

cabbage (roughly 3 c chopped)

onion (1 medium)

mushrooms, sliced (8 oz)

seasonings, mainly garlic and some red pepper flakes

Overall it turned out great! I do wish that I would have had more cabbage on had to bulk it up a bit, but it was delicious!

We opted to try out the noodle bowls again with a slightly different mixture. This one had

thin spaghetti

kale

mixed frozen vegetables

shredded carrot

a spice mixture of curry bullion and garlic chili paste – I lessened this compared to last week and I think I need to find the in-between of these two weeks spices. I will be experimenting and let you know!

That’s pretty much it for this week! Want to give it a try for yourself? Get this week’s meal prep grocery list here –

After my trip to Las Vegas, I was definitely ready for a food-reset! Am I the only one who finds it crazy that it was hard to eat healthy during a fitness conference? So when I got back, I knew I wanted to make sure that my meal prep for the coming week were packed with veggies!

Sadly, I didn’t get to enjoy it quite as much as I would have liked, since I ended up spending most of the week fighting off a minor flu. But that is okay! I got to experiment with some new recipes and I was able to save most of the prep that didn’t get eaten. The other plus side: Even while I was sick and had just gotten back home a few days before, I didn’t have to worry at all about what Draz was going to take for lunch or anything like that! Meal prep really can save you so much stress.

Enjoy!

For snacks, I changed things up a bit. Before I left on my trip, I got some really delicious local ground mustard that I love to use as a dip. So I cut up some veggies to have as a snack to go with it! A couple of the days I ended up taking some pretzels to dip in it too. Have you ever used mustard like that? It’s delicious!

For me, I made some burrito bowls inspired by this recipe, some garlic-y zucchini noodles (still working on the recipe for this one) and the One-Pot Cabbage Veggie Saute I shared with you yesterday! Overall, everything turned out great! With me getting sick, I ended up putting a bunch of the cabbage dish in the freezer, so I guess we will get to see how well that recipe freezes!

Happy 4th of July weekend everyone! I hope you are all having a lovely weekend! I actually got to celebrate a little for this holiday. My parents came to camp nearby, so I got to spend some time out there with them! It was great to just relax by the fire and chat 🙂

I am super excited to share this week’s meal prep with you all! Not only is it absolutely delicious, but it was really nice to our budget too. Enjoy!

So, in all my crazy distracted-ness, I actually forgot to photograph the snacks from this week’s meal prep. I kept things pretty basic though. Cookie dough protein balls for Draz, chicken lunchmeat and cheese, celery sticks and peanut butter, and a few hard-boiled eggs. These higher protein and fat snacks have been working great for me! If you have any suggestions for high protein snacks you love, I would love to hear about them!

One change I made to the Cabbage Sauteed with Chicken – I doubled the amount of chicken in the recipe. This recipe is originally intended to be side dish. So to make it work better for a main meal, I increased the amount of protein! I didn’t have to change anything else and it worked great with more chicken!

The Burrito Bowls were new and I absolutely loved them! I will admit, I was a little skeptical at first, since part of it calls for cutting up avocado and putting it in the bowls. But the lime did the trick and the avocado held up great throughout the week! For the shredded chicken, I used a variation of her Slow Cooker Mexican Chicken, but subbing out the tomato sauce for 2 cans of diced tomatoes (mostly because I didn’t have any tomato sauce haha). One thing to note for this recipe – it might make things easier to buy the avocados a few days ahead of time so they are ripe. I didn’t plan well for this, so I actually ended up assembling the burrito bowls a day later than the rest of the meal prep. Also, I left out the sour cream, since I’m not a big fan of it.

Here are the macros for this week’s main dishes:

Want to give this menu a try? Get your grocery list here!

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That’s it for me this week! What did you do over your holiday weekend? Did you still do meal prep? I would love to hear from you, so please leave a comment below!

Hey everyone! It’s been a while! And that fact is where the announcement comes in – I might be missing posts a little more often right now. I do love sharing my life with you all! My meal preps, fitness tips and so much more.

But part of taking care of yourself is working to find balance. And lately, well, my life has been pretty out of balance. I’m hard at work on my jewelry business and trying to build more of a career in fitness. Along with that, I’m still working overnights at my “regular” job and trying to maintain some time with Draz as well. Unfortunately, this doesn’t leave me nearly as much time for the blog as I would like.

I am going to try to still put out 2 posts a week, but I’m going to ask that you bear with me while I try to figure out my new schedule and responsibilities! Hopefully at some point I will be able to leave my overnights job and have a little more time available.

Now on to the second part of this post – the downside of weekly meal prep!

You all know that I absolutely love my meal prep. It helps me set up for success each week, save money and have more time! I’m able to plan well to hit my macros, feel full every day and keep my stress level down while I deal with my busy life. But there are some downsides as well. One big one is when your meal prep doesn’t go the way you hoped it would!

That is just what happened this week. Sometimes I will have one recipe I’m not thrilled with. This week I had the bad luck of all 3 recipes not turning out well! Add on to this that I didn’t check the macros before planning and so my carbs were over every day. And I didn’t make enough food for the week. So all in all, not a great week for food at our house!

But this is one of the risks when doing meal prep. There might be the occasion when you don’t like anything you cooked. Now, of course, this can happen any given week that you cook, even if you aren’t prepping. But there is something discouraging about knowing that all of your food is ready for the week and you don’t like any of it!

This is one of the reasons I encourage people to only test 1-2 new recipes any given week. This is usually a rule I stick to myself as well, for just this reason. That way, if something doesn’t turn out well, you have other options that you do like! It won’t save you from eating the dish you don’t like, but at least it’s not for every meal haha.

So, no recipes to share with you this week, because I’m not going to subject you to that! Instead, a reminder to try to pace yourself with new recipes. And a peak into my kitchen, showing you that even someone who meal preps every week has weeks that go wrong! It’s all part of the learning process!

Hey everyone! I hope you all had a lovely week! I know I did, and that was in part to having this delicious meal prep to enjoy every day when I got home! As you might remember from last week’s post, things have been a bit stressful here. Having our meals taken care of is one less thing that I have to worry about. That I got to try 2 new recipes this week that both turned out AMAZING just makes things even better.

Enjoy!

Nothing really new about our snacks and my salads. I am really loving these new-ish snacks right now, though I might look at adding to them soon! For right now, I’m just sticking to these Quinoa Omelette Bites and No-Crust Pizza Bites. And these salads are quickly becoming my new favorite! I think I’ve almost gotten them just the way I like them, so keep tuned for an upcoming recipe post 🙂

The real excitement this week is the main dishes. Draz asked for more Skinny Chicken Enchiladas, so those got added to the list. But with all the change-ups happening, I thought I would have some fun and try a couple new recipes. Both of these are really quick and easy to make, which makes them even more perfect for meal prep!

First up, Slow Cooker Chicken Curry. This was so easy to toss into the slow cooker and go about the rest of my prep. I cooked it for about 6 hours and then just shredded the chicken instead of cutting it up. It worked perfectly! This curry even got Draz’s approval, which doesn’t happen often! He likes curry but is more particular about it than I am. This one is being added to our “make again” list!

The other new dish of the week was Healthy Baked Chicken Italian Sausage and Peppers. Now, while I enjoyed the curry a lot, this one was my favorite this week! SO tasty! I used 2 packages of Sweet Italian Chicken Sausage that had 4 links each, and roughly 4-5 bell peppers. This ended up being put on 2 sheet pans, which worked out perfect. I love how simple, yet flavorful this dish is and we will definitely be having this one again soon!

For both of the new dishes, Draz had his with brown rice and I had mine with riced cauliflower. I’m really loving that frozen riced cauliflower I mentioned in last week’s post. I can honestly say I will probably be having this one a few times a week for the foreseeable future!

Hey guys! Are you as ready for spring as I am? I know that technically it’s already spring, but it sure hasn’t felt like it! I think that the “missing spring” thing definitely influenced this week’s meal prep. Stir-fry, for me, always makes me think of veggies and spring-time goodness. The funny thing is, I didn’t actually even realize that all 3 dishes were stir-fry until I sat down to write this! So I guess that tells you how observant I was this past week haha!

This week’s meal prep dishes were pretty delicious regardless. Like last week, this week was kinda split into “food for Draz” and “food for me.” But that’s ok! Sometimes it just works out that way.

I’m still making these Cinnamon Vanilla Protein Bites for myself and loving them! I don’t know if I mentioned it last time, but I did have the issue of them being a bit on the dry side when I first made them. Did you try them and have that issue to? Anyways, I figured out a solution guys! Just add a splash of unsweetened plain almond milk to the mix! It works great and they were much easier to form into balls.

For our main dishes this week, I made two of our favorites for Draz and a new recipe for me! For Draz, I made the Thai Peanut Chicken Pasta and Cabbage Sauteed with Chicken. Both of these are so good, though Draz’s favorite will probably always be the Thai Peanut Chicken Pasta. I did forget that I usually double that one, so we did end up a little short on food later on throughout the week.

For me, I made this Sweet and Sour *Tofu Peppers Broccoli. Now, the original recipe calls for chickpeas, but I was trying to lower the carbs, so I decided to try cooking with tofu for the first time! Because of this being my first time cooking with tofu, I’m not sure if that is what caused my overall reaction to this dish….which is kinda “eh”? It wasn’t bad, but I don’t know that I would make it again in it’s current form. I also cut the sugar in the sauce in half, but honestly I liked the sauce, do I don’t think that was the problem. I might try making this dish again with chickpeas and see how I like it then!

As always, here is this week’s macros breakdown!

Want to try this meal prep yourself? Get your grocery list with all the main dish ingredients here:

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That’s it for this week! Have you tried cooking with tofu before? Any tips for a newbie? I would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below!

Hey everyone! I’m so excited to be bringing you this week’s meal prep! Not only does it include some of my favorite dishes, but now you can use the free downloadable grocery list so you can make this meal prep for yourself! Right now the list is just for the main dishes…I would love to know what you think and if you would like me to expand that to include all of the rest of the prep as well. 🙂

Hey all! I am SO excited to be back to my normal blogging routine and to be sharing this week’s meal prep with you! This week’s prep was full of tasty recipes, both new and old, and a lesson learned. Now, if you have been following along over on Instagramduring my absence, you may have noticed that I have been having some fun on Stories each Sunday! I am loving going through each step of my meal prep and giving a behind-the-scenes look at how I prepare our meals every week. If you are wanting some ideas for how to go about your own prep, you should definitely check it out!

Hey everyone! I hope you all are having a lovely weekend! I have had a wonderful weekend, with the first ever Iowa BBG Meet-up, an easy meal prep (remember my posts are staggered by one week 🙂 ), a home movie-date with Draz and a lot of time working on my Etsy store!

Over the past few weeks I have been preparing for a weekend where things will be very off-schedule and I don’t know how much time I will have for meal prep. With a little planning though, we will still have awesome healthy food with very little to do that week! This week was the last of my prep for that upcoming week…. I added in some extra snacks and breakfast burritos for the freezer. And you can be sure that my freezer is pretty packed now!

One of the big advantages of meal prep to me is that I’m already thinking ahead to the coming week. So thinking a little farther ahead and looking at weeks that are going to be extra busy fits right in! Now, instead of looking at the coming weekend with stress about my routine being all crazy and unknown, I know I am prepared. I can just be excited! This is a pretty big change for me, since I am very routine-based. It’s amazing how being organized can actually make you feel more free and flexible! Do you have any things like this that you do?

Anyways, this won’t be the last time you see me doing extra prep for a future event. This one has gone so well that I think I will be doing something similar for an even bigger event I have coming up next month! I will be attending my first blogging conference, so there will be very little time to meal prep all weekend! Plus I’m going to want to have some healthy food options to take with me for snacks and such, so that will be added in too. I’m so excited!

But now, on to this week’s meal prep! Enjoy!

For the snacks and treats, I tried a couple new recipes this week. Double Chocolate Dairy-free Ice Cream is a “nice” cream with only four ingredients! It was super easy to make! While Draz and I both say that this doesn’t taste like ice cream to us, we both thought it was pretty tasty! I will definitely be making it again 🙂 It’s a nice dessert that’s still healthy! Plus the fact that it’s made out of things that we always have on hand. (I have SO MANY bananas in the freezer!)

The other new recipe was No Bake Maple Vanilla Latte Protein Balls, with a few small changes. I used whole wheat flour instead of almond meal and our protein powder is chocolate, not vanilla. I did add in the vanilla essence that was suggested as optional in the recipe as well. You might be shocked, but I think these might actually replace the Cookie Dough Protein Balls as our favorites! Draz seems to really like them and I love them!

Of course, I had to make up our favorites too! One batch of Cookie Dough Protein Balls, putting around half in the freezer to take out next week. Some Sweet Potato Banana Bites for me and I gotta tell you, I am loving the new change I made to this recipe! I was originally adding in Special Dark Chocolate Chips into the mix right before spooning it into the muffin tins. The last couple times I have been taking a square of unsweetened baking chocolate and chopping it up and adding that in instead. It’s not a huge change, but it has made a noticeable difference and I really like it!

Our salads were pretty much our basic this week, though I did add a few cherry tomatoes into each of mine 🙂 They are tasty! Another two weeks of breakfast burritos and my grapes and cheese for the week were the same as always and just as tasty as ever!

For our main dishes, I tried to keep things pretty basic this week, but I did try one new recipe: Butter Chicken Curry! I have to say, I loved this mild and saucy curry! I picked up some garlic naan to go with it and it was delicious! This will definitely be made again! That being said, we are still on the search for our favorite curry recipe. Draz like this one, but it wasn’t his favorite so far. Any suggestions?

Our other dishes were repeats for us: Thai Peanut Chicken Pasta (anyone surprised? :-p) and Unstuffed Cabbage Rolls. Both turned out wonderful! I did use some extra turkey in the Unstuffed Cabbage Rolls, just based on how the packages were weighed out. I really like how the Unstuffed Cabbage Rolls turned out, though I think I will try to spice it up a bit more next time.

So that’s it for this week! Do you have any events coming up soon where some meal prep in advance could make things easier? Have you ever tried that before? I love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment below!